Human rights activists in Nigeria on Monday hailed recent public statements by the United Nations rapporteur on torture as an important step towards ending abuses perpetrated by the country’s police.
"The rapporteur's report will help generate the kind of awareness we need about the practice in order to tackle it effectively,” said Nelson Okechukwu, a representative of the Civil Liberties Organisation, a leading human rights group in Nigeria.
The rapporteur, Manfred Nowak, who on Friday ended a week-long visit to Nigeria at the invitation of the government, told journalists, “I have come to the conclusion that torture is systemic.”
He said he found evidence of police routinely suspending detainees from ceilings, beating them and shooting them in the feet. Prisoners are often kept in dirty, overcrowded conditions and denied medical attention even for badly infected gunshot wounds, the rapporteur said.
His statement reflected widely held public perceptions that Nigerian law enforcement agents operate with impunity, Okechukwu said. “The situation is not helped by the feeling among police personnel that they have the power of life and death over ordinary citizens,” he said.
Kemi Asiwaju, a representative of Cleen Foundation, a group that monitors law enforcement, said torture is particularly common amongst the various criminal investigative departments in each of Nigeria's 36 states.
“Police are not well equipped with forensic facilities and are often under pressure to solve crimes,” she said. “They resort to torture especially when it comes to armed robbery.”
Asiwaju said her organisation is seeking to change police attitudes by helping to set up human rights desks within police divisional and area commands. Rights officers will monitor police conduct and advise on appropriate ways to treat suspects, she said.
In 2005 Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo promised to tackle abuses by police, admitting that gross misconduct occurs, including extra-judicial killings, torture and unlawful detention.
However, no law enforcement official has been prosecuted for torture, Nowak said, and this encourages a culture of impunity.
Speaking on the BBC on Friday, he said he suspected that some branches of the country’s security forces had tried to conceal evidence of torture when he came unannounced. However, he said other branches were willing to open their facilities and allowed him to conduct private interviews with detainees.
Nowak recommended that the government take "decisive steps" to criminalise torture as defined by international conventions and establish an independent mechanism for investigations.
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